When trying to decide which programming language makes the best career path, developers typically look for these four traits:

1. High salary
2. Popularity — plenty of job openings, variety
3. Tendency to become more in-demand in the future
4. Preferably easy to learn and pleasant to work with

For each language outlined in the list, you’ll see:

1. A brief intro to get you familiar with the language, what types of career options it can offer, and what’s cool about it
2. Language popularity diagrams according to TIOBE and GitHub Octoverse
3. Salary comparison based on data from Indeed.com and StackOverflow’s 2017 survey
4. The tendency in demand for the last five years according to Google Trends
5. A short example code snippet to give you a visual idea of the language’s syntax

At the end, I’ve included four lesser-known languages which gained rapid popularity in the past few years and are expected to be in very high demand:

• JavaScript
• Swift
• Python
• Java
• C++

Extracted from https://medium.freecodecamp.org/best-programming-languages-to-learn-in-2018-ultimate-guide-bfc93e615b35